Pretty much the nadir of the expenses scandal last week for staff at Conservative HQ was watching TV footage of Douglas Hogg, resplendent in a tweed flat cap, charging past a bunch of doorstepping journos looking for all the world (as one Tory aide put it to me) like he was "off to whip some peasants".

I'd be amazed if there are not more MPs announcing over the next few weeks that they are voluntarily stepping down or suddenly discovering the need to retire on ill-health grounds – avoiding all the awkwardness and humiliation, for both MP and constituency association, of deselection.

But what really struck me was Hogg's departing call for a general election to "refresh" parliament. David Cameron has suggested the same thing: the Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone blogged last week that she had been putting pressure on Nick Clegg to also urge the dissolution of parliament.

Of course there's an element of "They would say that, wouldn't they?" Look at the polls today and you can see why Cameron would like an election.

But the big headache for Labour now is this: if the abuse turns out to be so widespread that dozens of MPs are turned into electoral liabilities, do mass deselections make sense – and at what point does it just become easier to have a general election, and let the public decide who they think is a serious offender and who isn't?

We await all the details of Brown's "star chamber" to discipline offenders, but from what has so far been said he is talking about getting rid of Labour MPs who have broken the rules. We already know that, barring perhaps cases like that of David Chaytor and Elliot Morley claiming against mortgages that had been paid off, many of the most apparently extravagant MPs were acting wholly within the rules – it was just that the rules were far too lax. So that star chamber may not necessarily deal with all the cases that most upset the public.

Brown is probably right to think he needs to threaten deselections and arguably should have done so before now, given that he now looks once again as if he is following Cameron's lead. But he may be wrong if he thinks that will be the end of it. If there are not enough deselections, the public will be left dissatisfied: if there are too many, the logical case for a general election may become very hard to refute.

The Labour party is now saying that Brown's disciplinary "star chamber" will examine breaches of parliamentary rules and Labour party rules (which include a requirement for MPs not to bring the parties into disrepute). Which would seem to allow for MPs to be deselected even if their claims were agreed by the Commons Fees Office, if those claims looked excessive or embarrassing enough. So that potentially puts more MPs at risk and makes the question of an early election more central.

This process does gives some control back to the party over what happens to its MPs: they should at least all be judged now to the same standards, rather than allowing some to get away with dubious claims because they happen to get on well with local activists or have a safe seat while others get chucked out because their seat is marginal or hostile to them for other reasons.

It might slow things down, though. Most constituency associations would have been talking to potential miscreants this week and then trying to decide if they still want them to stand at the next election. Now they'll have to wait for a formal process. Not that the Tory equivalent proposals seem to be slowing them down, admittedly. ConservativeHome says Anthony Steen, MP for Totnes (who spent significant sums of taxpayers' money protecting shrubs from rabbits and cutting back trees at his Devon property), may now face deselection.